1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document management system or the like in which an information processor is communicably connected with a server apparatus which manages document data, a thumbnail image of the document data, and annotation data to be combined with the thumbnail image.
In recent years, there is a need to improve operational efficiencies in various companies. As such, documents are often digitized. Additionally, the price of storage medium (disk) has been reduced. Thus, there are a large amount of documents to be searched. How fast to retrieve a target document from many documents to be searched and which document is processed first significantly affect operational speeds.
In such circumstances, as for operation of receiving and placing orders through a fax (facsimile apparatus), an order slip received by the fax is digitized and stored in document management software. Response operation is performed to notify a customer of a delivery date and the like with respect to the received order slip. In this operation, the document is annotated such that additional information including the delivery date is added to and stored in the document, and the document is sent back to the customer.
Such annotation is used in various applications. For example, an annotation is used as a delivery date sent in response to a recipient, and a memo added by an operator who performs response operation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Accordingly, as the number of annotations in a document increases, it is more difficult to identify an important annotation among them. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-339005 discloses a technique which allows an annotation to be easily identified by switching display/non-display of annotations added by other users. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-350554 discloses a technique in which an annotation that should be noted can be easily determined from among annotations added to a digitized document.
However, the above described techniques make it easy to distinguish an annotation added to a document only when the document is opened. Therefore, in the above described techniques, if there are many documents to be handled, for example, during operation of receiving and placing orders through a fax, documents need to be opened one by one to check an annotation. This causes difficulties in the operation. In addition, if an annotation to be sent to a recipient (customer) and an annotation added as a memo by an operator are pasted in a mixed manner on a document, it is troublesome to delete some of the annotations when the document is faxed to the recipient or is sent as a file attached to an e-mail.
An object of the present invention is to provide a mechanism which allows a document to be easily checked and improves operating efficiency.